Category Archives: android

I installed CloudGOO on my Android phone today (they say an iOS version is in the works), I love the idea of showing all my cloud based files across different services as if they were all together on one big drive. CloudGOO also supports automatic upload where you can specify which service to use, or let CloudGOO decide based on the space you have available.

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A while back I asked “Why Not Put Traveler in the Android Market?”, things have changed since I wrote that. For one thing the Android Market is now called Google Play. As of yesterday IBM Traveler for Android is now available in Google Play. Thanks for listening IBM.

What this is saying is that if you download the Traveler client using the Browser that came with the Android OS (Usually labelled simply ‘Internet’) the Server name and Username will fill in and after installing the configuration screen will look like this

What is becoming increasingly common is that people are using Chrome or Firefox on their Android devices and ignoring the default browser. When using the non-default browser after installing your configuration screen will look like this

Traveler will still configure correctly but you will have to manually fill in your server name, and user name to complete the configuration.

Carat is a research project that aims to detect energy bugs—app behavior that is consuming energy unnecessarily—using data collected from a community of mobile devices. After running Carat for about a week, you will start to receive personalized recommendations for improving your battery life. We are based out of the AMP Lab in the EECS Department at UC Berkeley, collaborating with the University of Helsinki

If you are running Carat or decide to install it leave a comment with your device, OS and J-score I am interested to see how different devices stack up.

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Yesterday it finally arrived, my brand new Samasung Galaxy S III, my first Android phone that was not manufactured by Motorola. This is not a full review of the phone, I haven’t even tried any of the new features like NFC, or any of the Samsung specific features like S-Beam, S-Voice, S-Memo or S-Suggest. So far just focused on getting all my apps installed and configured, and finding my way around the phone.

Size and Feel

The phone is slightly larger than my Droid X, but not noticeably, I have seen many reviews that say the construction of the phone feels cheap because of the plastic back, but it doesn’t feel that way to me. The phone only has three physical buttons (Power, home, volume). The virtual back, and menu buttons are taking me a little time to get used to, but I am sure in a few days I will be adjusted.

Speed and Network

The phone itself runs incredibly fast, and the Verizon 4G speeds are a significant improvement over my old 3G phone, apps that took 2 seconds or longer to launch on my old phone load up with zero lag time at all on the new phone.

Battery Life

The jury is still out on this one, but it seems to be that it is no worse than my Droid X meaning I won’t get through an entire day on the go with this phone on one battery, but with various mobile chargers I have, and a spare battery I should be good to go. One interesting aspect of the battery is that the NFC antenna is actually in the battery, which means if you expect to use NFC you need to purchase a Samsung battery most of the off brand ones do not have the NFC antenna built in.

One other difference for me is the charging port is on the bottom of the device, not the side as it was on my previous phones, this is better when using the phone while connected to a power source, but means my phone can no longer sit (in landscapte mode) in a desktop cradle while charging.

Camera

Definitely one of the features I was looking forward to, the camera is fast and zero lag on the shutter. I miss having a dedicated camera button, but do like that you can launch the camera direct from the lock screen. While using the camera it is a little too easy to hit the home button, or the volume buttons which control zoom, but I am sure I will get used to working around those buttons.

NFC

For all the talk about Near Field Communication I don’t exactly see a ton of use cases for it, Verizon does not install the Google Wallet application (there are some hacks to make it work, though I am not sure I go anywhere that pay by NFC is supported). At some point I might get a pack of TecTiles and play with programming them, though right now the only thing I can think of is to stick them to my kids and program them to launch Instagram.

Miscellaneous

The power widget which has always resided on my Android home screen and provides one touch access to settings is gone, and moved to the notification area, this is good in that it is easily accessible while not taking up space on the home screen. In the process though a couple of items were removed namely the screen brightness controls, and wifi on/off. I will have to take another look at Power Control Plus and see if that fills the gap.

Overall

Initial impressions are positive, some learning curve coming from an Android 2.3 phone, and the change in buttons, but I think I am going to like this phone.

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Back in 2009 (when apparently I was a much bigger fan of iOS) I wrote about how Apple got it right in how they managed OS upgrades compared to RIM who let the carriers control when and if devices got upgraded. Sound familiar? Substitute Google/Android for RIM and it is the exact same scene playing out all over again.

To highlight the absurdity of this yesterday Google announced Chrome for iOS, while Chrome for iOS is far from perfect if I choose to I can install it today on my original iPad 1. Everyone knows though that I prefer Android over iOS, so what about Android? Yes Chrome for Android has been out for a while and is now out of beta….. if you happen to have a device running Android 4.0+. So while I have an Android Phone running 2.x and a tablet running 3.x (neither of which will officially ever see an upgrade to 4.0) if I want to run Chrome on a tablet I need to turn to an Apple product.

No I am not going to abandon Android, there is too much I like about it, but the Android Update Alliance announced at Google IO in 2011 has not been heard from since.

Device updates were clearly not RIM’s only (or even biggest) problem, but Google should nonetheless learn a lesson and fix Android updates, it is long overdue.

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I like the new icons, and glad to finally have High Availability in my Traveler environment, my dev system is upgraded from beta to gold, and now working on the plan to migrate a rather large Traveler production environment in to a High Availability cluster.

Just have to wait for an updated Sametime Client icon now to match the others.

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Swiftkey 3 was released today, I have been a long time Swiftkey user, including the beta of Swiftkey 3. There are many things I prefer about Android over iOS, but typing use Swiftkey is high on the list.

Swiftkey learns how you type to give you better predictions, if you give it permission it can also learn your typing style by reading your Twitter and Facebook posts, as well as read your Gmail account and blog.

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